


A Modern Fairy Tale

by Shadaras



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/F, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-20
Updated: 2013-05-20
Packaged: 2017-12-12 10:40:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/810655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shadaras/pseuds/Shadaras
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A short fic explaining one way that Jenny and Vastra might have gotten together.</p>
<p>
  <i>This is a very simple story. One might even call it a fairy tale, if one were inclined to such things; it is indeed a story of the fantastic, and does have danger, love, and, perhaps, even a moral, as fairy tales are wont to include these days. One could even say it has a dragon who captured a lady, but one would be greatly exaggerating the truth of the matter.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Modern Fairy Tale

This is not the kind of fairy tale where I fell in love at first sight. I would say that this fairy tale doesn’t even have fairies in it, or magic, but Madame Vastra has taught me many things about the world since that chance encounter so many years ago, and the foremost lesson is that nothing is impossible. Oh, it may be implausible, but impossible?

I have seen a man who dances through time in a police box. I have been on a spaceship. I have met aliens, and some have become quite good friends of mine. And I am married to Madame Vastra, a Silurian, whose race has inhabited Earth for far longer than humanity as a whole will ever realize.

This is not a story of those adventures. This is a very simple story. One might even call it a fairy tale, if one were inclined to such things; it is indeed a story of the fantastic, and does have danger, love, and, perhaps, even a moral, as fairy tales are wont to include these days. One could even say it has a dragon who captured a lady, but one would be greatly exaggerating the truth of the matter.

The first incident occurred on a winter day where, in the midst of a snowstorm, no snow fell.

We were investigating the cause, of course, doubting that it was anything so simple as the weather being kind and granting us a brilliantly clear day in the middle of winter – we were wrong to doubt, but that is not the point of this story – when we came upon a curious little creature that seemed to be made of frost and very little else. I bent closer, enchanted by this magical-looking being. It looked very much like a rabbit, or a fox – something small, and white, and covered in soft fur. I reached a hand out, mesmerized enough to forget that one should never touch an unknown being without taking extensive precautions. Before Madame Vastra could pull me away, its frosted fur bristled, striking me through my glove.

I cried out, of course, and the Madame was next to me in an instant. She gave the creature – already running away – a scathing glance and scolded me, but the words did not penetrate the miasma of pain that encroached upon my mind. With what I suspect was a curse she was glad I could not hear, the Madame pulled me upright (I forget her strength far too easily; she is made of muscle and wire and wields her sword with strength that I once would have believed only a man could hold) and hauled me back home as quickly as she could manage. I remember little of the journey but her arm wrapped around me, a solid weight against the delirious pain that left me incapable of even the simplest movements, but denied me the grace of unconsciousness.

She brought me back to her mansion, of course; only there did she have the materials to remove a toxin not of this world. I suspect that even if the toxin had been of Earth, she would have removed it herself – she had no love for the doctors of my age, calling them fools and charlatans at any chance she got. At first I would protest, but when she took me to see other times and other places – courtesy of the Doctor and his wondrous blue TARDIS machine – I was forced to agree with her assessment. These other places had not only medicine, but technology and people which I would never have dreamed of in my wildest imaginings. I cannot even conceive of a way to explain the wonders Madame Vastra has shown me over the years. Fortunately, I do not need to explain the wonders of other worlds and times; I merely need to explain the wonders she herself is capable of, and the marvelous being she is.

I can remember that she sucked the toxin out of my hand with her mouth. It was the first time I had felt her lips, and the memory of that sensation, beyond all else from this incident, stays with me. Her lips were dry and leathery. It brought to mind the serpents I had once had the debatable pleasure of being introduced to by a very devout preacher. He insisted that every member of his flock meet what he called “Satan incarnate”. I am unsure what he believed the purpose of this exercise to be, but I have never forgotten the way the snakes coiled around each other and our arms, muscles clearly evident beneath hard scales. The touch of Madame Vastra’s lips was a sensation like, yet utterly different from, the touch of a serpent’s body. Her lips were warmer than the snakes’ skin had been, and more supple; I could almost forget that they were not precisely human, for they looked and felt much the same (I have not shamed myself or my family; I know the feel of my mother’s lips, and my sister’s, but I have never known the feel of another human’s lips upon my own).

When I woke the following morning, neither of us mentioned what had happened, save for Madame’s reminder not to touch anything I cannot identify without doubt as safe.

The second incident occurred during a particularly wild adventure involving the sewers, a highly advanced compass, three people who swore on the Virgin Mary that their housepets had tried to kill them (all sweet little lapdogs or well-behaved cats), and a stubborn alien who either couldn’t or wouldn’t speak in any language I understood and (if the Madame’s testy comments were accurate) thought me a pet because of this. He tried to capture me – for my own good, I gathered he believed – and I soon proved him wrong about my supposed status. I used the sword Madame Vastra had gifted me and taught me how to use – it was a tad less effective against the alien’s thick fur than I was expecting, but I soon adjusted – and he quickly found himself on the other end of capture.

Madame Vastra did not interfere in the fight, though I knew that if I had found myself in true danger she would have taken charge of the battle at once. That she did not feel the need to, and, indeed, let me deal with the rascally alien myself lit a warm fire in my breast. As I looked at her over the defeated alien (my sword was pressing delicately against its fur over a presumably vital area), she was smiling at me, and I could not help but match her expression. She stepped forward and lightly brushed my cheek with her warm, dry lips. I lifted my free hand to my cheek in surprise, and the alien took advantage of my indisposition to try and run away. Madame Vastra kept him well in check, however, with a fluid lunge and slice of her sword through his legs.

Now that the alien was well and truly bound (and saying things that were no doubt very rude in his own language), I sheathed my sword and turned to the Madame. I could not quite find anything to say, but she seemed to understand. She just smiled, traced a light line across my cheek and around my ear, and kissed me again, this time on the lips in a way I could not misunderstand. I cannot recall my response to her, save that it was very incoherent and involved my entire body flushing with heat in a combination of excitement and shame.

I am sure I followed Madame Vastra out of the sewers, taking that strange alien with us, but I have no specific recollection of the events of that day. I know that I made my excuses that evening when she wished to converse with me, pleading the need for some rest after such an eventful day. She did not press me on the matter, merely nodded and said that she would be about, if later in the evening I felt up to a conversation.

I still do not know what would have happened if such a conversation had occurred that night. I was quite busy trying to organize my thoughts; the kiss Madame Vastra had bestowed upon me had ignited sensations I had been led to believe I would only feel for men, and even then only men of my own race. Madame Vastra was neither; she is more than either and she is beautiful, but she is neither human nor male. She has scales upon her skin, no particular qualms about eating human flesh, and venom that I have seen kill both human and alien opponents. She is deadly and I did not understand why she found it appropriate to kiss me – me, her maid and her companion, but never quite close enough to be called her friend, at least to my mind.

Beyond the simple considerations of her species in contrast to mine, there was the complex matter of my enjoyment of her company. I had believed that I enjoyed my time spent with the Madame because she treated me like an equal, insofar as it is possible for a working maid like myself to be equal to a person as old as time and whose race alone makes her more powerful than I could ever hope to be on my own. She taught me skills that I never heard of a woman learning, especially not one of my standing. She thought it wonderful that I thought things through and saw connections she could not, and that I could tell her about the human social order and shed light on the mysteries she loved to puzzle through and solve. She thought me competent and brave and told me so.

And now she had kissed me like a lover does, like a man kisses the woman to whom he is engaged, like she had a right to enjoy me and like I should enjoy her in the same way.

I spent a long and sleepless night thinking about that kiss. I spent many days’ free time pondering it, turning it over, trying to come to any form of conclusion. In the end, all I could agree with myself on consistently was that I had enjoyed the kiss and would not mind another, and that I was very unsure what to think of myself and whether I should consider myself monstrous for desiring – in whatever way – this person of another race entirely. It wasn’t even like I was desirous of an African or a Moor! This was Madame Vastra, a Silurian, a lizard-person whose species was effectively extinct! She may still be from Earth, still be humanoid and intelligent and good-hearted, but she is not and never will be human.

The third incident occurred in the middle of summer, on one of those rare days wherein the sun shone brightly and we had nothing in particular to do. We took a carriage to the city’s edge, and strolled down the river Themes, choosing silence over the conversation that hovered in the air between us. For some time we kept to ourselves, seeing occasionally others who had chosen the same diversion in sunlight as we. Only when we progressed far enough that the city was a memory on the horizon and the sun was beginning to fall did we stop, though it took some time – and still-silent agreement – to search out suitable places to sit by the generally muddy banks of the river.

When at last we took our seats, side by side on low stones, it felt as if the world itself froze and we were the only creatures breathing. I finally looked at the Madame, and, in a motion I had been refusing, shying away from, unsure of the repercussions of, I reached for her veil and drew it away from her face. “I do not find this necessary, as far from civilization as we are,” I said, voice a whisper – not by choice, but because I simply couldn’t bring it to be any louder. I did not touch her, not then. The thin fabric caught on the roughness of my fingertips (roughness that hadn’t been there, not truly, until I had entered her service), and she looked at me, storm-blue eyes uncovered, open, and soft in a way that I knew I had been expecting but was no less striking for the expectation.

“It has never been necessary between us,” she said. I do not believe she moved, though I must admit to being too caught by her face, by the delicate lines of her scales arcing back until they almost became horns, to truly notice. “Other barriers, perhaps, have been needed. Are they still?”

That was the question, of course. Months had passed since it was first asked, months since that first kiss, that first sign that there was interest. Months in which there was a delicacy, a hesitation to every motion Madame Vastra made towards me: the pause before she corrected my stance, the way she inhaled ever so slightly and steadfastly refused to look straight at me as we stretched before practice, the courtly bows as I entered the dining room, even how she knocked on my door instead of simply entering when she needed to rouse me from sleep. I had spent long days and longer nights cataloguing all the little things I hadn’t noticed before, all the little things that had changed as we spent more time together, all the ways in which I knew that kiss hadn’t been a fluke.

I lowered my hand from her veil, now safely fastened out of her face, and swallowed. I could feel my heartbeat, quick and fierce, those same qualities that Madame Vastra sometimes gave to me (and I remembered the smile on her face as she said them, and my heart raced faster still). All those little tells. I had just as many, though I knew not whether the Madame had noticed. I had agreed to enter her service, after all; that was the most significant sign, though the others – some tiny, unnoticed even by me; some very intentional, though occasionally marked by lacks – sprung more easily to mind.

“No,” I said at last. “I don’t think so.”

I kissed her, then. Kissed her soft, kissed her with breath as much as lips, kissed her so that she could draw away if I was wrong, if she didn’t truly want this. I kissed her, then, and her hands rose up to hold me, one behind my neck pulling me closer as her lips (soft as scales, soft as the serpent, sweet and scale-rough on the edges but so soft and gentle) pressed into mine, parting slightly as I felt her breath meet mine.

The touch burned through me, and I wasn’t sure I could breathe. I realized then that I was holding her, holding her so tightly that on a human I would worry about bruising, but on her I knew that her scales would disperse the pressure, keep it from being too much, and when I pulled back, eyes wide and breath rushing in and out as my brain caught up to my body and filled it with fear, I could see Madame Vastra smiling. She kissed me again, quick and gentle, and then murmured, “I was hoping that would be your response.”

I smiled back at her, helpless, unable to find any words to express the rush of gratitude and relief running through me. Oh, there were worries still, confusion about what it would be like to love someone of a completely different species, but that was immaterial right then. At that moment, the only thing that mattered was her smile, her joy, and the way she held me and kissed me and let me forget, for a time, the world.


End file.
